


one plus one

by Siria



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Community: cliche_bingo, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-08-10
Updated: 2009-08-10
Packaged: 2017-10-03 19:18:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time Rodney had stepped through the gate to Atlantis, he'd understood intellectually just how far he'd travelled in what had felt like no more than a single step.</p>
            </blockquote>





	one plus one

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to sheafrotherdon for betaing. Written for cliche_bingo for the prompt 'Miles from Anywhere (Geographical Isolation)'.

The first time Rodney had stepped through the gate to Atlantis, he'd understood intellectually just how far he'd travelled in what had felt like no more than a single step. There were light years between the city and anywhere he'd ever called home; there was no real comparison between the months he'd spent cooped up in a remote, under-heated bunker in Siberia with a group of unhygienic peons, counting down the days until he could get back to the States, and making a choice to be one of a hundred people travelling to a place that was a myth, to a galaxy which perhaps hadn't seen humanoid life in millennia. Forget any _National Geographic _ specials Rodney had ever seen about people trekking across the Sahara, or walking to the South Pole: this was making a conscious decision to be marooned on a desert island so remote that it wasn't visible to the naked eye back on Earth.

Rodney had known all that, but the crazy thing—the thing that he'd never really sat down to consider, not for a long time—was that Atlantis had never made him feel as if he were cut off from where he needed to be. Not that there weren't things from Earth that he missed, particularly during that first year—his cat; takeout; the internet; the possibility of patching things up with Jeannie—but having found what a team and a city and a purpose could be like, what it felt like to wake each morning and breathe in Atlantis' copper-salt air, there was no room around him that allowed for isolation.

This, of course, was all before what passed for John Sheppard's brain had produced an idea so hare-brained that even his odds-defying luck couldn't protect him from the consequences. So here they were—the two of them, Rodney and John, stranded on an island half an ocean away from M68-H97's only stargate, without Ronon to help them find a supply of potable water, without Teyla to stop Rodney from using the most offensive of his extensive vocabulary of expletives—and for the first time in a long time, Rodney was feeling the strain of distance.

"I'm just saying," he said as they scrambled over the uneven, white-and-sulphur plain, "normally _I'm_ the one who uses my... how is it you put it?"

"Rodney."

"My big fat mouth, I think you said, so charmingly, on P45-J9R. It's normally _my_ big fat mouth which ensures that we're, we're..." Rodney flapped his hands, searching for an appropriate way to convey just how screwed they were.

"We're so fucked that we don't even realise how fucked we are because it's impossible to fucking grasp the scope of how thoroughly we're fucked?" John supplied calmly.

Rodney looked over at him. "Didn't I say that already? Didn't I already make that _exact_ observation?" Despite the heat, John hadn't done much more than roll up the sleeves of his BDU shirt, but there were droplets of sweat beaded in the stubble over his upper lip, and his sunglasses weren't able to hide the deepening lines around his eyes, the ones made starker by the bright afternoon light.

"Yeah, Rodney, you did. It was five minutes and three of those... lumpy trees ago, and I heard you."

Rodney thought with fondness of the lumpy trees, which looked like an upended elephant's leg which had sprouted shocking pink flowers where the toes should be. Did elephants have toes? He didn't know, but it was possible that he'd been out in the sun for too long, and he thought with fondness of the scant shade that the trees had cast. "It's a pity you didn't hear me as well when I was telling you not to piss off the Oklassiians, and now look at us: stranding in the middle of a desert that smells like sulphur and looks like the kind of elephant graveyard Walt Disney would have designed when he was on an acid trip, and believe me, of all the places I ever thought I'd die... Do you know what death by dehydration looks like?"

Out of the corner of his eye, Rodney could see John's jaw tighten. "Okay," he admitted in a kind of peace offering, "okay, so it's not like I _told_ you as such."

"Don't remember you saying _anything_," John said, grunting as he clambered up onto a low ridge of rock.

Rodney followed him, with perhaps less economy of movement, grasping at rock and the bulbous roots of an elephant tree in equal measure. He lay gasping at John's feet for a moment when he made it to the top of the ridge, then said "I kind of think that in most cases? My disapproval of inciting a civil war is, you know, _implied_," before he got to his feet.

"I didn't start a civil war," John ground out, marching on in what they thought was the direction of the coastline without looking to see if Rodney was following him.

"Yeah, but you didn't exactly stop one either," Rodney pointed out. "There were more knives on display when they were hustling us onto that plane than I've seen in Ronon's _hair_." There was a small stand of trees on the horizon that looked a little like giant mushrooms that had sprouted green leaves. He thought they could make it there in about a half hour—there'd be shade and the possibility of finding water. And where there was water, there might be a settlement, or the ruins of one, and where there was a settlement there might be something that Rodney could use to call for help, or at least keep them alive until Ronon and Teyla got to them.

"There was no civil war, Rodney!" John stopped and turned to look at him, taking off his glasses, and the tone of his voice wasn't quite frustration. Against the bright blue of the sky and the shocking yellow of the rocks, he looked dusty and tired, and even in his black BDUs, he seemed blunted by the bright colours around him.

Rodney opened his mouth to protest, then snapped his jaw closed. That tight look on John's face, the one that said he thought he'd messed up, meant that maybe this wasn't a good time for Rodney to argue the point with him. "Fine. Fine, okay, let's just—walk."

"_Thank_ you," John said, and Rodney repressed the urge to sniff. There was no call for sarcasm. He sighed instead, tried not to think about how long it would be before they could have any hope of Teyla and Ronon coming after them, and thought that maybe he could occupy himself mentally for the rest of their trudge over towards the trees with composing a very pointed email to the manufacturers of the clothes he was wearing. Breathable and sweat-absorbent? Hah. But before he could walk away, John reached out and snagged him by the wrist.

Rodney squinted at him. "What? What? Honestly, I'm sorry, I mean it, there was no civil war, we just ended up here because of a friendly little disagreement, and—"

"Rodney." John stepped closer to him, still holding Rodney by the wrist. "Shut up." Which was so not where Rodney thought this was going that he did, for once.

Now that he had Rodney's attention, John didn't quite seem to know what to do with it. His eyes were a little wider than usual, his grip on Rodney's wrist firm, and he didn't quite make eye contact with Rodney when he said, "We're going to get out of this. You know that, right? Might take a little longer than usual, but you and me, we'll get home."

Rodney looked at him for a long moment—at his Adam's apple and his too-pointy ears and the long scrape on his cheek from when he'd gotten a little confrontational with that Oklassiian guard—and then stepped a little closer, to where he could smell the sea-salt of John's sweat and hear how his breathing hitched and evened out. It was just the two of them, standing close in the middle of a primary-colour desert, and it was curious, Rodney thought, how that horrible I'm-going-to-die-alone feeling had just gone away. And Rodney hadn't made a conscious decision to be here—couldn't really even remember the first time he'd looked at John and thought _huh, yeah, okay_—but maybe this wasn't quite like being marooned after all.

Rolling his eyes felt safest, so Rodney did that, and said, "When you say 'we'll get home', you mean 'we'll have to wait until Teyla and Ronon come pick us up', right? Because going by our previous track records on triumphant returns to Atlantis..." He kept his tone light enough that John snorted and ducked his head and Rodney took advantage of that—leaned in to press a soft kiss to the corner of John's mouth, right where his grin usually lived.

"Come on," Rodney said, setting off once more with John at his side, "I need shade and a rest and a foot massage."

"Oh, from who?"

"Who do you think?"

John wrinkled his nose. "I've seen your socks, Rodney. I've _smelled_ them. You can massage your own damned feet."

Rodney squawked in outrage. "You're talking to _me_ about hygiene, Mr If-I-Can't-Smell-Myself-I-Don't-Need-A-Shower?"

"It's called being eco-friendly!"

And this was a variation of a conversation they'd had a half hundred times before, on Atlantis and Earth and several moons and an orbital space station—and really, Rodney thought, having John with him was like keeping going to a place he'd never been before, and knowing that everything would be okay when they got there.

_Photos were taken on Socotra Island, off the coast of Yemen. The island has been cut off from mainland Africa for the last 6-7 million years, and like the Galapagos Islands, it's full of rare wildlife and plants—it is home to 700 rare species, a third of which are found nowhere else on earth, like the trees shown above, the Desert Rose and the Dragon's Blood Tree. Pretty fascinating, yes?_


End file.
